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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K John le Carré and Salman Rushdie are duking it out in a public fight over freedom of speech and religious respect. Should Rushdie have expected the threats on his life when he published the Satanic Verses? Join the fray in the Books section of Table Talk. R E V I E W S
R E C E N T L Y The art of life
The Gospel according to Paul
The Salon interview: Doris Lessing
The man who took sex out of the closet
Reckless genius
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save these books! page 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray
BY DAVID J. GARROW | He's America's best-known living assassin, and the best biography of him has been out of print for almost 20 years. Just this year alone, hundreds of far-too-credulous news stories have publicized James Earl Ray's claims of innocence for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Ray's been making such claims for years, but until recently few people other than Ray's own media-hungry lawyers paid him much heed. Now that Ray has succeeded in scamming King's own family into proclaiming his innocence, many people who are utterly unfamiliar with the overwhelming evidence of Ray's guilt wonder whether something is amiss. It isn't. George McMillan's "The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray" isn't perfect, but it's invaluable. It was written prior to the exhaustive 1978 House Assassinations Committee hearings into King's murder, but McMillan's immersion in the tightly knit world of Ray's family pointed the way toward the House Committee's own conclusion that Ray's assassination of King probably was aided by one or more of his own relatives. Ray was a racist, but his expectation of a big-bucks reward from far-right segregationists made money, not racial malice, his No. 1 motive. If you're at all interested in Ray, look for McMillan's biography in your local library or in second-hand bookstores. And don't despair: Sometime in 1998, Gerald "Case Closed" Posner promises the same thorough review of King's killing that won him wide praise for debunking the legions of JFK conspiracy theorists. Posner's forthcoming "Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr." ought to be the best we've seen, but McMillan's pioneering work ought to be far better remembered than it is. David J. Garrow, Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University, is the author of "The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr." (1981) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography "Bearing the Cross" (1986). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Sears Catalogue
BY JANE AND MICHAEL STERN | As writers who try to document popular culture, our most valuable resource has always been the Sears Catalogue. Square, common and only timidly trendy (you could buy Scottie-dog ash trays in 1938, Flower Power wallpaper in 1968, open-to-the-navel disco shirts in 1985), this vast syntagma of American stuff is a reflection not of reality, but of the popular vision of what life was supposed to look like, year by year. When it ceased publication after decades of providing a meticulous portrait of idealized normalcy, America lost a great communal touchstone. From this one book, mechanics could buy heavy-duty overalls and city socialites could shop for minks. For the entrepreneur in search of a home business, Sears sold flocks of chicks guaranteed to grow up and lay dozens of eggs. For the backwoods wife far from any dry goods store, Sears provided pages of panties and industrial-strength girdles and brassieres (many a young lad's first exposure to cheesecake images of the female form). In this one book, you could find a hunting rifle, a love seat, a diamond engagement ring or a tractor axle. Now there are "niche" catalogs such as the Sharper Image and Victoria's Secret. They are interesting facets of cultural anthropology; but none have the scope of vintage Sears. Novels, essays and motion pictures that purport to show or tell what America is really like strive to be insightful or profound. The Sears Catalogue was neither. It was the American dream in the raw. Jane and Michael Stern have written 22 books about American culture on subjects that include Elvis Presley, Roy Rogers, good food and bad taste. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Raft is not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist Christian Awareness By Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh. Beacon Press, 1975 BY bell hooks | Even though I read a book a day, there are always books that stand out -- that touch me in the very core of my being. "The Raft is Not the Shore," though now out of print, is one such work. Like many of the books that have transformed my way of seeing and being in the world, I was loaned this book by a fellow student who like me was grappling with issues of spirituality and political activism. We were hanging out on the cool bohemian left side of the tracks yet trying to hold on to our beliefs in a divine presence and walk a spiritual path. We were wrestling with the big questions of whether or not we supported violent social change or non-violence -- of whether we believed in the transformative power of love. Folks I hung out with didn't believe in higher powers, but they were militantly seeking after justice. Uncertain and unsure of how to reconcile a commitment to challenging oppression with a heartfelt belief in love, compassion and forgiveness, I felt at times as though I was losing all direction. Unresolved questions were burning me up inside. I found answers in "The Raft is Not the Shore" -- ways to keep the faith. More than 20 years after first reading this book, I can be a witness, testifying that its truth guided and sustained -- was a light unto my path. bell hooks is the author of 15 books, including "Killing Rage" and "Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood." Her most recent book is "Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life" (Holt). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My Dog Tulip
BY CAROLINE KNAPP | J.R. Ackerley is fascinated by his dog's bowels. Charmed! He loves to watch her squat to relieve herself, and he describes the act with the aching tenderness of a mom: "Her long tail, usually carried aloft in a curve, stretches rigidly out parallel with the ground; her ears lie back, her head cranes forward, and a mild, meditative look settles on her face." "My Dog Tulip," Ackerley's 1965 love letter to his grand Alsatian bitch, was deemed "the first highbrow dog book ever written" by Punch magazine. It is certainly the most poignant, in large part because Ackerley is so unwavering in his focus on the dog as a dog, a creature both profoundly loved and essentially inscrutable, governed by her own rules and instincts and codes of conduct. There is no anthropomorphic slop here, no sentimental gushing about canine loyalty or heroism. Dog, in Ackerley's view, is in the details, and it's the details he provides. Along with the bodily functions (which are covered -- lovingly -- in an entire chapter called "Liquids and Solids"), there are deeply tender renderings: the look in Tulip's eyes when he has to go off without her ("stricken, compounded of such grief, such humility, such despair, that it haunted me all the journey up"); the sense of utter failure he feels when he misreads Tulip's request to go out and she defecates indoors ("She had used every device that lay in her poor brute's power to tell me something and I had not understood ... Alas for the gulf that separates man and beast"); the tiny moments of connection and disconnection that make up our mysterious, wordless attachment to the dog. Ackerley achieves something that's rare in animal literature: a view that's both endearing and unsentimental -- like dogs themselves. Caroline Knapp is the author of "Drinking: A Love Story." Her next book, "Pack of Two," is about human-dog bonds. It will be published next fall by Dial Press. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The African Witch
BY MADISON SMARTT BELL | "The African Witch," by Joyce Cary, is a novel set in British colonial Nigeria in the 1930s. Cary, a master among English novelists of his time, wrote a number of novels set in Africa, of which "The African Witch" is the most complex, and perhaps the most rewarding. Cary renders the British colonials with a deftness that combines Dickensian caricature with a more modern, psychological approach, while his African characters are drawn with insight seldom rivaled by writers foreign to African culture. Cary's narrative shows an extraordinarily sympathetic comprehension of cultures outside the European tradition, and his sympathy allows him to tell both sides of a story very similar to that recounted in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The clearness of its portrait of the differences between minds formed by different cultures makes the tragic story of "The African Witch" quite relevant to our own times; since Cary, only Paul Bowles has done the same job better, or as well. Joyce Cary wrote more than one masterpiece, but now even "The Horse's Mouth" (till recently a staple of college curricula) has become hard to find. Along with much of his other work, "The African Witch" deserves rediscovery. Madison Smartt Bell's novels include "Save Me, Joe Louis" and "All Souls' Rising," which was a National Book Award finalist. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This was Racing
BY IRA BERKOW | "This Was Racing" may have been out of print for some 40 years, but it was and remains a classic, and desperately difficult to find. It is a collection of columns by the turf writer for the New York Herald Tribune from 1946 until his death in 1952, at age 48 -- the defunct Herald Tribune still has the reputation for having perhaps the best-written sports section ever. Palmer's esteemed colleague, Red Smith, dedicated a collection of his own columns to Palmer, calling him "the best writer I ever knew." In his foreward to "This Was Racing," Smith recalls some Palmer gems: "Horses like Man o'War, 'as near to the living flame as horses get' ... People like Lyin' Fitz, 'whose wooden-legged stable cat could catch mice with one paw and blackjack 'em with the other.'" And there are examples such as the following of Palmer's uncanny ear and delightful observations: "There is a humorous fatalism among professional racing people, best expressed perhaps by the riding instructions given to a steeplechase jockey some years ago by a stable foreman: 'Don't be skeered of dyin'; just let him run!" Ira Berkow is a sports columnist for the New York Times and the author most recently of "To the Hoop" (Basic Books). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dear Dead Days: A Family Album
BY ROZ CHAST | "Dear Dead Days," published in 1959, is a relatively unknown compendium of photographs, engravings and more that inspired and delighted the cartoonist Charles Addams. Here are some of my favorite entries: a snapshot of a bona fide three-legged boy wearing jaunty striped leggings, his hand resting casually on his third thigh; a gruesome yet matter-of-fact photo of an elevated train wreck; a picture of the knife with which Jan Doot, Dutch locksmith, cut out his own bladder stones; an alarming photo of a woman pulling a sheet of skin from her chest halfway up her face like a turtleneck sweater; medical devices that look just like instruments of torture, as well as actual instruments of torture; an advertisement from a mortuary industry magazine from the '20s for a corpse-shaving powder; a photo of Anna Belle Grey, who started out as one person at her feet, and everything was just fine until somewhere around breast level when she decided to branch out and grow herself two heads; a photo of a man who was scalped, but healing nicely; Siamese sheep; the morbidly obese; bearded infants and much, much more. Also, I now know that in 1802, two people in Portsmouth, N.H., died of mortification, and one died of "scaldhead." Roz Chast's cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker since 1978. Her most recent book is "Childproof: Cartoons About Parents and Children," published this year by Hyperion. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To Absent Friends
BY JIM LEWIS | Whoever came up with the idea for Red Smith's "To Absent Friends" had a strange and wonderful thought: a collection of the New York sports columnist's obituaries, mostly of athletes and newspaper men, though there is one for Jimmy Walker and one for a horse named Your Host. Open the thing and flip through it: Valediction succeeds upon valediction, each one an offering, impeccably rendered -- on deadline -- in Smith's sidelong and slightly brittle fashion. It is, by its nature, a melancholy collection, and then again a fantastic one. Did these men actually exist? Toots Shor, Bummy Davis, Paul "Big Poison" Waner? Not to mention lesser figures, like Big Frenchy La Mange or Bugs Raymond. In 1963, the year I was born, Smith was saying goodbye to Jack Kearns. Who? He was Jack Dempsey's manager, and a wonderful anecdote follows; then another; then another. This isn't just sportswriting, not by a long shot. It's demotic, cock-eyed history and American prose at its typical finest, at once lapidary and throwaway. Smith knew what it meant for a full-grown man, properly so called, to spend his life at games -- to indulge in a practice that might be trivial, if it didn't manifest so much that we care about: honor, good humor, endurance, ecstasy. After all, isn't writing the same? Smith himself died just before "To Absent Friends" was published, and it's since lapsed from his publisher's catalog, along with all of his other books. Every one. Jim Lewis' second novel, "Why the Tree Loves the Ax," will be published by Crown in February. FROM SALON'S STAFF AND CONTRIBUTORS: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Lord of Light
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | The 1960s saw a schism develop between fans of so-called "hard" science fiction -- technology-driven and science-based -- and the Tolkien-besotted devotees of magic-filled fantasy. Genre boundaries are more useful to booksellers than imaginative writers, though. In 1967, just as these lines were hardening, Roger Zelazny wrote a tantalizing novel called "Lord of Light" that brought the worlds of science fiction and fantasy into magnificent alignment -- giving fictional life to Arthur Clarke's famous dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In "Lord of Light," a spaceshipload of human beings escaping a dying Earth have set themselves up on a distant planet as the gods of the Hindu pantheon -- hoarding their technology to lord it over the world's lower castes. The book follows the life of a rebel hero named Sam who adopts the trappings of Buddhism to oppose the powers-that-be. Reincarnation machines, elemental demons (the planet's original natives), zombie Christians, palace intrigues among the gods and fierce battles fill out a teeming epic canvas. "Lord of Light" holds up today as much for the playfully grand style Zelazny adopted as for its inventive, suspenseful tale: The book at once embraces mysticism and ironically toys with it. Behind every miracle there's a machine of some kind -- and yet the miracles still command awe. "Lord of Light" is comparable to "Dune" in sweep and quality, yet Frank Herbert's 1965 book is still widely available while Zelazny's is out of print. Of course, there was never a movie of "Lord of Light," nor did its author produce mountains of mediocre sequels. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Medusa Frequency
BY LAURA MILLER | Herman Orff, an obscure London novelist reduced to writing comic books, decides to get his brain zapped with a hot-wired EEG device in the hope that it will jump start his third novel. Soon he's carrying on an intermittent conversation with the head of Orpheus, as well as the legendary sea beast the Kraken, which communicates with him via the green phosphorescent letters on the screen of his Apple II. This slender book about love, art, loss and delusion, by the author of "Riddley Walker" and "Turtle Diary" (both also out of print), deftly combines a stubborn, self-deprecatingly British sense of humor with a mythic undertow of surreptitious power; the first time I read it, I wept through the conclusion without quite understanding why. The fantastic strain in Hoban's work seems to have kept his reputation on the windy side of full literary legitimacy. Only "Riddley Walker" made much of a splash in America, largely because it was written in an invented, post-apocalyptic dialect that could hardly fail to impress. As a result, frustratingly few readers know that Hoban is also a wondrous stylist, one who wields the earthy, brambly, resonant beauty of the English language in a way that's positively Shakespearean. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Boy
BY KATE MOSES | Only a couple of the six Jean Giono novels that North Point Press saved from American obscurity in the early 1980s are now still in print. "Blue Boy," the story of Giono's indelibly remembered Provençal boyhood before World War I and the inspiration for Marcel Pagnol's classic film "The Baker's Wife," isn't one of them. That's a damn shame, because it is not just the most accessible of Giono's passionate, lyrical works, it is also a palimpsest of all that he wrote about in his 50-plus books. In "Blue Boy" are found the enigmatic characters who live on the honey and bitter herbs of life in the stone-housed villages of Provence: the wandering acrobats, the generous and ugly country folk, the political idealists, the melancholy poets -- such as his cobbler father, by whose fire young Giono "ripened into a human being ... like a great round loaf" -- and the romantics, like Giono himself, with need for "heroism, love, and bruising," for whom it seemed "that all the princesses had been rescued without waiting for me." But Giono did find a princess to rescue, in his abiding faith in the region that created him and in his passionate, even ecstatic observation of the natural world. For Giono, a schoolmate's bloody nose becomes "a little flower at the end of a shining stem of fresh blood" on a child's cheek; spring lambs "bounded ahead of us like spray on the water." "Remember, all of man's happiness is in the little valleys," one of young Giono's neighbors had advised him. Giono the writer never forgot. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Alma
BY CHARLES TAYLOR | There may be nothing as wondrous and horrible in pop culture as its ability to contain meanings never dreamed of by the people who produce it. In Gordon Burn's "Alma," the wondrous and the horrible are flip sides of the same 45, spun by a DJ who hears echoes of each in the other. Hidden meanings spring forth like poisonous and beautiful night-blooming flowers. "Alma" is the fictional memoir of Alma Cogan, a pre-rock English pop singer who died of cancer in 1966, 34 years old and five years past her last hit. It's Burn's conceit that Alma, knowing her career had peaked, didn't really die but chose to retire, and has lived quietly, as good as forgotten. The novel is set in 1986, when another English celebrity -- of a sort -- is back in the spotlight. As one-half of the Moors Murderers, Myra Hindley aided her lover, Ian Brady, in murdering children and burying their bodies on the Manchester Moors. In '86, Hindley, who'd found religion in prison, agreed to help authorities locate the graves of other victims. The hooded scarecrow figure Alma sees on the news, seeking expiation for her crimes, bears no relation to the surly mug shot that fixed Hindley in the minds of the British public. And as Alma visits her old London haunts, she finds that the pop image she left behind bears no relation to the person she has become. Listening to her records, looking at her publicity photos, she discovers, to paraphrase Nabokov, a stranger in a snapshot of herself. Long before these two women intersect, Burn has captured the ways in which the echoes of pop culture continue to reverberate decades later. The book is loving and pitiless, richly evocative but utterly without nostalgia or sentimentality. Burn omits neither the beauty of a black schoolgirl seen through a rain-swept windshield as "Be My Baby" plays on the car radio nor the eeriness of old vaudevillians roaming the aisles of a supermarket that stands on the grounds of a theater they once played, like ghosts haunting a burial site. It's oddly fitting that "Alma" should be out of print, swept aside for the next bit of product just as its heroine is. And it makes perfect sense that a book about the persistence of ephemera should be so unforgettable. As a fan and then a writer, my life has been bound up with pop culture. This is one of the three or four books I've read that I can say, absolutely, changed the way the world looks to me.
Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Cooking of Vienna's Empire
BY PATRIC KUH | To Joseph Wechsberg, fusion cooking was not Euro-Asian but Austro-Hungarian. The melting pot was not Manhattan but Vienna. Moravian by birth but Viennese by inclination, he once described Vienna as being "a city in G minor," the musical key that best expressed "Vienna's ever-present mixture of gaiety and sadness, euphoria and gloom." The euphoria was in the ballrooms, the sadness in the politics. In 1938, with Hitler in power, Wechsberg left for the United States. He tried to write fiction, but by force of dumbing-down his sophistication to characters with "Riviera tans," he failed. He turned to nonfiction, writing for the New Yorker, Holiday and Gourmet magazines on subjects from Verdi to food. In the late 1960s he returned to Vienna to write a cookbook about an Empire that no longer existed. It may have been bankrolled by Time-Life, but it was a very Viennese enterprise. Large-format, full-color and mass-market, Wechsberg gave the book all that he had: " The color of Wiener Schnitzel should be a light golden brown. Certain Breughel paintings and Stradivari violins have the perfect Schnitzel color." But reality kept intruding. A bar he remembered in a grand Viennese hotel had become the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Commission. A once-famous cafe in Budapest was a communist sporting goods store. One pictures him tracing the course of the Danube and walking the streets of Vienna, Prague and Budapest, knowing that it was the irony of his doomed mission and not a cookbook that best captured the essence of central European sophistication. But a cookbook it is, one full of gaiety and sadness. A cookbook in G minor. Patric Kuh, former Commis de Cuisine at Guy Savoy in Paris, a Michelin two-star, is the author of the novel "An Available Man." He has written about food frequently for Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Life is Elsewhere
BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | Every once in a while, a single idea confronts you with such rude force that it doesn't just change the way you think about the world, but it changes the way you think about the act of thinking itself. Such was the case for me when I first read "Life is Elsewhere," Milan Kundera's profoundly amusing portrait of a young poet growing up in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and '40s. A chronicle of the short life of Jaromil, a sensitive and talented mama's boy who possesses only as much revolutionary fervor as is required to win him the favor of his mentors and girlfriends, "Life is Elsewhere" wittily satirizes the ways in which the preoccupations of a particular era (Freud, communism, modernity) can shackle artistic ingenuity and individual integrity. Kundera both pities and pokes ruthless fun at his hero, whose efforts to define his inner source of inspiration are thwarted by even his own art teacher, who tells Jaromil early on that the real author of his poems is not him but a poet inside his head over whom he has no control. "That poet is the mighty unconscious stream that flows through every human being. It's no accomplishment of yours that this stream -- which plays no favorites -- happened to pick you as its violin string." This concept -- of ideas that simply exist, floating around freely and occasionally manifesting themselves, quite by accident, in one of us -- seemed to me, a chronically confused college freshman, at once liberating and deflating. I would spend the next four years putting everything under a microscope, but "Elsewhere" prodded me to first figure out just who was spitting on the slides. The other existential themes I encountered in Kundera's novels -- impossible loves, a lack of a priori values -- which I once found so compelling, now seem stuck in a certain time. But I have yet to answer the basic questions "Elsewhere" raises about where inspiration comes from, and 10 years later, the process of finding out still fascinates me. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Steps in Time
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK | When I had my childhood crush on Fred Astaire -- a crush I've never grown out of -- I happily trailed home from the library one day with a copy of his autobiography, "Steps in Time," and read it from cover to cover. Looking at the book now, I see how it still captures what I think of as the essence of him: It's fleet and simply written, with lots of short sentences and few flourishes -- it has a streamlined kind of elegance. Sure, it could have been ghostwritten, but somehow it just feels like his voice, and I still believe that it is. Astaire wasn't one to air details of his private life in public. He clearly preferred talking about his work, and he dug right in. A chapter called "Feathers" covers the filming of 1935's "Top Hat" and the difficulties he had with Ginger Rogers' (he refers to her as "Gin") feather-covered dress: "We then went for the dance and again the feathers took over. The cameraman stopped us, saying he couldn't photograph the number that way, and also that the floor was covered with feathers ... The feathers kept flying, the wardrobe lady shook the dress and the sweepers swept them up, but they kept flying and we could not get an OK take. It got to be funny after a while. The news went out all over the lot that there was a blizzard on the 'Top Hat' set." When movie stars set down their own stories, they always come off as nicer people than they probably are in real life. Astaire comes off as a sweetheart, but you just know he had to be. His book reads like his dance routines: Stripped of excess, it's like pure joy of movement on the page. He made the most out of every muscle he had, not the least of which was his heart. Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a regular contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Gospel Singer
BY DWIGHT GARNER | Nearly all of Harry Crews' best work is long out of print, and it's hard to single out a specific title to mourn. The typical Crews protagonist is an absurdist one-trick pony, a character who escapes -- as Crews once did -- from Georgia's swamp country by becoming a performance artist of some kind, often a very freakish one. In 1972's "Car," a character named Herman Mack commences to eat an entire Ford Maverick; in 1988's "The Knockout Artist," a boxer named Eugene Biggs exploits his ability, via his fantastically vulnerable jaw, to knock himself out. Crews has a flair for appraising and celebrating these weird gigs, yet he also has one eye fixed on the nervous line that separates enthusiasm from pathology. These comically bent sagas become spectacles of antic miracle and wonder; the best of them have a star-spangled, whacked-out earnestness that might remind you of Robert Altman's "Nashville." They're peculiarly American masterpieces.
Having said all that, Crews' best novel may well be his first -- a spooky and soulful night train of a book titled "The Gospel Singer." It's about a young man whose ethereal voice allows him to flee his dirt-poor past in tiny Enigma, Ga. When he returns to the town, however, he's idolized by the town's residents -- they attribute him with healing powers he doesn't have. The singer isn't sure he wants the truth known, and there's something about his corruption that seems to infect and diminish the entire town. Crews is an alert, rock-solid stylist who tells this story with remarkable care and decency. He fully evokes the way the singer "burst forth full as the sun" from this town of "hookwormed children and leached soil and poor-bone cattle," and you understand why he means so much to nearly every citizen. A decade ago, I found a copy of "The Gospel Singer" in a second-hand store and read it in one sitting. Two nights ago, it happened again.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL ELROD |
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